My boyfriend and I are planning an international trip for 2014, and want to travel over the week of South by Southwest so that we can rent out our apartment to cover some (or all?) of the travel costs, but we have no idea what's a reasonable price to charge, or when the rental market will be hottest. For those of you who have rented out your places before, what service did you use (e.g., Craigslist, Airbnb, HomeAway), what did you charge, and how far in advance did you post your listing? Do you have any tips for novices on how to have a successful experience?
Obviously, we'd like to bring in as much money as possible, and we think prices may go up as availability goes down, but I don't want to wait too late/charge too much and be left without a tenant, and, frankly, I'm reluctant to buy our plane tickets until I know that we'll be able to bring in at least $1000 or so to defray costs.
To give you a sense of what we're working with, we have a "luxury" 2-br apartment in a new building about three miles from downtown, with a king-sized bed in the master bedroom, and a full-sized air mattress in the second bedroom (which is primarily used as an office). A bus downtown stops right outside our building, and we're planning to provide our bikes for guest use as well. We were thinking of putting it up for $150-$200 a night based on some initial browsing on Airbnb, but we really have no idea if that's way too high or way too low.