[patio11]

What volume of pages are we talking about?

At below-mass-scales, I would encourage you to keep the page content roughly similar to what it is, mark expired pages as expired, and maybe put a modal window with "This ad is expired. See related ads or post your own ad." or something on top of the old content, with an option for people to close that and see the archived content.

At mass scales (more than "thousands" of pages), I'd suggest either a) doing the above but also no-indexing those pages or b) 301 them to the category page. The rationale for this is that you don't want to get hit by Panda for having lots and lots of not-so-much-value pages.

[bee]

Yeah I have thousands of pages. And I would want to remove them permanently as I don't want to give users non-value pages.