Perth, Jan 29: A rare technical outage linked to the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) disrupted property settlements across the country on January 27, leaving buyers, sellers and legal practitioners facing uncertainty for hours — and in some cases, overnight.
Renee Roumanos, Founder and Principal Lawyer at Renee Roumanos Legal told DailyStraits.com that she was first notified in the late afternoon, around 3 to 4pm, after settlements expected to complete earlier in the day failed to finalise.
“We were notified that there were technical difficulties with the RBA with respect to funds being exchanged, and as a result the online e-conveyancing PEXA workspaces would experience issues outside of PEXA’s control,” Roumanos said.
Property settlements are typically scheduled for around 2pm and usually take about 30 minutes to complete, with funds transferred and keys released shortly after. On this occasion, however, Roumanos said funds were not transferring in real time, preventing settlements from legally taking effect.
“Everything had been signed off and looked on track, but the funds weren’t being transferred. Without the disbursement of money, settlement simply couldn’t occur,” she said.
Roumanos described the incident as unprecedented, noting she had never seen a disruption of this scale in her five years of practice, and said colleagues across the country reported similar impacts.
“I’ve never seen this sort of issue happen before. It’s incredibly rare… it was unprecedented for everyone,” she said.
The outage created significant stress for buyers and sellers alike, particularly those with removalists booked and belongings already loaded onto trucks. Roumanos said practitioners were forced into urgent, time-consuming negotiations to secure early access to properties — even though buyers were not yet legally entitled to keys.
“We legally don’t own the property… we have no right to the keys, but we were negotiating in good faith that the seller would be kind enough to release keys to the buyer given the circumstances,” she said.
In one matter handled by her firm, early access was successfully negotiated for a client whose belongings were already in a truck outside the property.
“We had to negotiate early access… a licence to occupy the dwelling subject to settlement occurring,” Roumanos said. “We were very lucky that the seller was kind. However, kindness is not contractual and no one has an obligation in these circumstances to be kind.”
Roumanos said settlement consequences vary by state. In New South Wales, sellers may apply penalty interest for late settlement, while in Queensland, parties may have stronger termination rights if settlement does not occur on the contractual date.
“Every state has different rules… technically in Queensland, if you don’t settle on your settlement date, technically if people wanted to be cruel, they could bring the contract to an end and they could keep a deposit,” she said.
Her firm had five settlements scheduled that day, including three purchases involving buyers moving into homes. While only one client had belongings in a truck, Roumanos said some colleagues had multiple simultaneous settlements, compounding the stress and risk.
“When you’ve got multiple households impacted because they can’t get keys, they can’t settle… that flow-on effect impacts everyone down the line,” she said.
Roumanos also questioned why the disruption appeared to receive limited public attention at the time.
“It’s very concerning… I find it really confusing that the media has not been talking about this and how the media was very quiet about this sort of thing occurring,” she said.
Meanwhile, The Reserve Bank said it experienced a system issue on the morning of January 27, 2026, affecting some RBA payment settlement services, including certain payments and property settlements.
“The issue occurred at around 10:30am and resulted in some file based payments being unable to be processed,” the RBA said, adding the cause was identified and services were progressively restored, with file exchange services becoming available from around 5:20pm the same day.
The RBA said the Fast Settlement Service was not affected, but a subsequent issue further delayed some PEXA property settlements, resulting in around 500 property transactions not being completed before the end of the settlement day. The settlement day was extended to 10:45pm.
The central bank said it had been working closely with industry participants and remained in regular contact to support recovery and resolution. Following restoration of services on Tuesday, financial institutions were able to resume exchanging payment files and progressively process delayed payments.
“The RBA apologises for the disruption caused and recognises the impact this would have had on financial institutions and their customers,” it said.
The RBA added there had been no further system issues since late Tuesday evening, and customers still experiencing difficulties should contact their own financial institution.
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