Legal

Terms & Conditions

Version 1.0 · in force from 10 September 2026

These terms govern the mentoring services provided by APC Excellence Mentoring LLC. By registering for a programme you agree to them, and we record which version you accepted. Please read them before you pay.

1. Who we are, and what these terms are

APC Excellence Mentoring LLC ("we", "us", "our") is an independent professional mentoring practice registered in Sharjah, UAE. These Terms & Conditions govern the mentoring services we provide to you and form a binding contract between us from the moment you accept them.

You should read them before you pay. If there is anything here you are not willing to agree to, do not complete your registration - write to info@apc-em.com and we will talk it through.

2. Definitions

• Candidate, "you" - the individual who registers. Registration is personal; it cannot be transferred to somebody else.
• Programme - the mentoring service you register for, as described on our website and in your Service Agreement.
• Service Agreement - the individual document you sign at registration, which carries your candidate number, your fee and your cohort.
• Materials - session content, recordings, sample submissions, templates, checklists and written feedback we supply.
• Portal - the candidate area we give you access to once your payment receipt reaches us.
• RICS - the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors, which is not a party to this contract.

3. Which document wins

Three things describe what you are buying, and they can fall out of step. If they conflict, they take precedence in this order:

• your signed Service Agreement, on anything specific to you - your fee, your currency, your cohort, your programme;
• these Terms & Conditions, on everything else;
• our website and marketing material, last, and only where the first two are silent.

Nothing said in conversation, on a call or over a messaging app varies this contract unless we confirm it in writing and both of us agree to it.

4. Registration, eligibility and your place

Places are limited. A registration is a request for one; your place is secured when we have received your fee in full and confirmed it to you in writing. Until then we may decline a registration, and if we do we return anything you have paid.

You are responsible for your own eligibility with RICS and for the route and pathway you enrol under. We will give you our view, and it is worth having, but the decision and the consequences of it are yours. We do not enrol you with RICS, submit on your behalf, or correspond with RICS about your candidacy.

The information you give us at registration - your name, your address, your country of residence - goes onto documents that carry legal weight. It has to be accurate, and it has to be yours.

5. What the programme includes

What is included is what was listed for your programme on our website on the day you registered, together with anything set out in your Service Agreement. In broad terms that is scheduled live sessions delivered online, structured review of your submission documents, mock interview practice, and access to the Materials for your cohort.

Sessions are delivered in English, online, at the times published for your cohort. Where a session is recorded, the recording is made available to your cohort for the duration of the programme; it is not a substitute for attending, and we do not guarantee that every session will be recorded or that a recording will remain available indefinitely.

6. Changes we may make

Running a programme over several months means dates move. We may change session dates, times, running order, the platform we deliver on, or the mentor leading a session, where it is reasonably necessary to do so. We will give you as much notice as we practically can.

If we make a change that materially reduces what you registered for - not a rescheduled evening, but a substantial reduction in the programme itself - and you tell us within fourteen days that it is not acceptable to you, we will offer you a place in a later cohort or a proportionate refund of the fee for the part not delivered.

7. Fees, currency and payment

Your fee is the amount stated in your Service Agreement, in the currency set for your country of residence. It is payable in full, in advance, by bank transfer to the account named on your invoice, quoting your candidate number as the payment reference.

Bank charges, intermediary bank fees and currency conversion costs are yours, not ours. A transfer that arrives short of the invoiced amount because a bank has taken a fee in transit is not payment in full, and we will tell you what remains outstanding.

We do not accept cash. We will never ask you to send a fee to an account other than the one on your invoice, and we will never ask for your portal password. If you receive a request that appears to come from us and does either, it is not from us - tell us at info@apc-em.com before you act on it.

8. Refunds, cancellation and deferral

Once your place is confirmed, the fee is not refundable. That is the case whether or not you attend the sessions, complete the programme, sit the assessment, or withdraw partway through. It is stated here, on the registration page and in your Service Agreement, because it is the term most likely to matter to you later and you should not be able to say you were not told.

The exceptions, in full:

• we cancel your cohort and cannot offer you a place in a reasonable alternative one - we refund the fee for that cohort;
• we make a material change you reject under clause 6 - we refund proportionately;
• we decline your registration before confirming your place - we return what you paid;
• a right of withdrawal you have under UAE consumer protection law that cannot lawfully be excluded - which this clause does not attempt to exclude.

A request to defer to a later cohort is not a right, but it is not a formality either: we will consider it seriously, and we will say yes where we reasonably can. Ask early. A deferral granted after a cohort has begun may carry a charge for the part already delivered, which we will tell you before you accept it.

9. Your portal account

When your payment receipt reaches us we create an account for you and email you a temporary password. You will be asked to replace it the first time you sign in, and you should, because until you do it is a password that exists in an email.

The account is yours alone. Keep the password to yourself, do not let anybody else use the account, and tell us promptly if you think somebody has. You are responsible for what is done through your account, except to the extent it follows from something we got wrong. What you put in your profile should be accurate; your mentor prepares from it.

10. Materials, recordings and intellectual property

The Materials remain ours, or our licensors'. Registering buys you a personal, non-transferable, revocable licence to use them for your own APC preparation, for as long as you are on the programme and afterwards for your own reference.

It does not buy you the right to:

• record, screen-capture or re-transmit a live session;
• copy, publish, upload or share the Materials, including to study groups, cloud drives, messaging groups or document-sharing sites;
• sell them, or use them to deliver training of your own;
• use them to train, fine-tune or ground a machine-learning system.

Your own submission documents remain yours. Our written feedback on them is ours, and you may use it for your own assessment freely.

11. Confidentiality, both ways

Sessions involve candidates discussing real projects, real employers and real mistakes. That only works if what is said in a session stays in it. You agree not to repeat or publish another candidate's material or circumstances outside the cohort.

The same obligation runs towards you. We treat your submission documents, your feedback and your circumstances as confidential, and we do not discuss them with your employer, your supervisor, your counsellor or RICS unless you ask us to in writing, or the law requires it of us.

12. What we ask of you

• Attend the sessions, and send work for review in reasonable time - a document that arrives the week before your submission cannot be reviewed properly, and we will say so rather than pretend otherwise.
• Give us accurate information about your experience, your route and your progress.
• Submit your own work. Passing off somebody else's experience, or text you did not write, as your own is a matter for RICS under its Rules of Conduct, and it is a matter for us under clause 13.
• Treat mentors, staff and other candidates civilly.

13. Suspension and termination

We may suspend or end your access, without refund, if you breach clause 10, 11 or 12 in a way that is serious or that you do not put right after we have asked you to. Abuse or harassment of a mentor, member of staff or another candidate needs no second chance and will not get one.

You may stop at any time. Clause 8 tells you where that leaves the fee.

14. We do not guarantee your result

We cannot and do not promise that you will pass. We provide mentoring, structured review and practice. Your assessment outcome is determined by RICS, through its own panel, on the evidence you present on the day.

Nothing in our sessions, our feedback, our mock interviews or anything said by a mentor is a prediction, an assurance or a warranty of a particular result. A mentor telling you that your submission is ready is a professional opinion, not a forecast.

15. We are independent of RICS

APC Excellence Mentoring is an independent professional mentoring practice and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or acting on behalf of RICS. References to RICS competencies, pathways, routes and assessment procedures are descriptive, and are there so you can tell what we are talking about. RICS is not a party to this contract and owes you nothing under it.

Where our mentors hold roles with RICS - as assessors, chairs or counsellors - they do so in a personal capacity, entirely separately from the services provided under these terms. Those roles confer no advantage on any candidate of ours, and any suggestion otherwise, from any source, should be treated as false.

16. Conflicts of interest

You will not be assessed by your own mentor. Where a mentor would otherwise be assigned to a panel assessing somebody they have mentored, the conflict is declared and managed under the relevant professional body's rules, and the mentor steps away from that panel.

If you become aware of a connection between a mentor and your own assessment that concerns you, tell us at info@apc-em.com and we will deal with it.

17. Our liability to you

We will provide the services with reasonable care and skill. Where we fall short, our total liability to you arising out of or in connection with the programme is limited to the fee you paid for it.

We are not liable for indirect or consequential loss, and specifically not for loss of income, loss of opportunity, delayed chartership, or the cost or consequence of a referred or failed assessment.

Nothing in these terms limits or excludes liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be limited or excluded - including your rights under UAE consumer protection law.

18. Your personal data

We handle personal data in accordance with our Privacy Policy, which forms part of these terms, and with UAE data protection law. In short: we collect what we need to run the programme and issue your documents, we keep it as long as we have a reason to, and we do not sell it.

19. Events outside our control

Neither of us is in breach of this contract for a failure caused by something genuinely outside our reasonable control - and for our part that includes loss of internet or platform availability, illness of a mentor, government restriction, or an act of a public authority. We will tell you, and we will reschedule what can be rescheduled. If such an event prevents a substantial part of the programme being delivered for more than sixty days, either of us may end this contract, and clause 6 governs what is refunded.

20. How we contact each other

Email is how this contract is administered. Notices from us are validly given when sent to the address you registered with, and it is your responsibility to keep that address working and to look in your junk folder - a message we sent and your provider filed is still a message we sent. Notices to us go to info@apc-em.com.

Messaging apps are convenient and we use them, but they do not serve notice under this contract and nothing agreed on one varies it.

21. Signing electronically

Your Service Agreement is signed electronically: you draw your signature, and we record it with the date, the version of the documents you were shown and the address of the device you signed from. You agree that this constitutes your signature and is admissible as such, under UAE law on electronic transactions and trust services (Federal Decree-Law No. 46 of 2021). A copy is emailed to you at the time.

22. If something goes wrong

Tell us. Write to info@apc-em.com with your candidate number and what has happened. We will acknowledge it within three working days and give you a considered answer within fourteen. We would far rather hear a complaint early than read about it later.

23. Changes to these terms

We may update these terms. The version that binds you is the one published on this page when you registered, identified by the version number you accepted and recorded against your registration - not whatever appears here afterwards.

If we change them in a way that materially affects a cohort already under way, we will tell the candidates affected, and the change will not apply to you without your agreement.

24. General

• Your registration is personal to you and cannot be assigned or transferred. We may assign this contract to a successor to our business, on the same terms.
• If a court finds any part of these terms unenforceable, the rest stands.
• Not enforcing a term on one occasion does not waive it.
• These terms, your Service Agreement and our Privacy Policy are the whole of the agreement between us on this subject.
• Nobody who is not a party to this contract has any right to enforce it.

25. Governing law

This contract is governed by the laws of the United Arab Emirates as applied in the Emirate of Sharjah. The courts of Sharjah have exclusive jurisdiction over any dispute arising from it, without prejudice to any mandatory protection available to you as a consumer under UAE law.

26. Contact

APC Excellence Mentoring LLC, Sharjah, UAE. Questions about these terms: info@apc-em.com.