The yield tends to be much better than the stock market or even hard/private money lending.

Hello All,Currently I am employed at a insurance company in New York City.I"ve been saving my money for a a year now hoping to get into real estate investing and stocks.

I've been investing in the stock market through my Roth IRA for about 8 years.

For me I want close to a 25% cash on cash return to put my money in, but there are lots of people that are ok with a lot less (CD's, stock market, savings accounts).  

It's the same thing with a Stock.

If you leverage you'd get better returns, of course, but you can leverage stock market funds too.

Stocks and real estate generally offer greater potential rewards but also come with greater risk.The reward I am referring to is the cash flow, NOT the total return on the property including profits from capital gains.

He would also be targeting the stock market, and every single person's retirement accounts.

Would you try and sell a stock not on the stock market?

The barrier is not technological capability - there are 10s of thousands such buildings in Europe {search on Passivhaus} - but lack of will (economic and political).Equally important, and potentially more difficult problem to solve, is retrofitting of existing building stock to achieve significant energy use reductions in a cost effective manner.