Cambridge’s office rents could drop in 2014, the fate of the suburbs hangs on amenities and Boston’s investment sales volume will be below last year’s numbers.

Those are some of the highlights from this morning’s NAIOP/SIOR annual market forecast. 

Starting across the Charles River, Cambridge’s office market, which was red hot just a year ago, has cooled, with sub-leases causing negative year-to-date absorption of about 290,000 square feet, said David Townsend, senior director for Cushman & Wakefield 

However, in the next six months, Townsend said he expects multiple large leases to be announced. Currently, several companies are looking for office space in Cambridge, including HubSpot, in search of 100,000 square feet; Momenta, for 200,000 square feet; Ariad for 240,000 square feet; and the Cambridge Innovation Center, which is seeking 50,000 square feet, according to Townsend.

 In the suburbs, landlords will need to seriously rethink and reposition their properties to succeed going forward, said Duncan Gratton, partner with Cassidy Turley FHO. In the last year, there has been an unprecedented exodus of companies east to Boston from the suburbs as companies want to be closer to the area’s highly educated workforce, with those workers preferring to live in the same amenity-rich area where they work.

And Boston’s investment sales volume will be below the number of transactions that occurred last year, said Frank Petz, head of Jones Lang LaSalle’s capital markets team. It doesn’t help that institutional owners and REITs own upwards of 40 percent of the downtown office market, Petz said, adding that, since there’s so little product on the market to buy, owners are not currently willing to let go of their assets.