Sunderland was heavily targeted by UKIP and Leave, because it's traditionally one of the first places to announce poll results, so it carries an unnaturally high profile on the results shows. And Newcastle, being geographically adjacent to Sunderland, might well have had some knock-on effect.
IMO there is no chance whatsoever of a "Leave" outcome, and that the result will be a robust "Remain" outcome (I predict 53/47 FWIW). Betting exchanges, city polls and forex markets* are all good places to go for seeing which way the wind is blowing (and better, I'd suggest, than the traditional polling companies, whose methodologies are still deeply flawed when it comes to accurate predictions of real-world outcomes).
And just perusing the BBC right now, I see they are trying to ape their General Election style by making predictions on a "local authority by local authority" basis (just as they would make predictions on a constituency-by-constituency basis in a General Election). The fundamental problem however is that one can make reasonably robust predictions on how national moods map onto predictions for political constituencies in a General Election, since there's a long history of voting patterns to use as a baseline. By contrast, there's no realistic way of mapping national opinion forecasts onto an LA-by-LA basis for this EU Referendum, since there are no comparator historical data.
The only ways in which it would make any sense to try to predict on an LA-by-LA basis would be either to try (unsuccessfully, IMO - except for in the obvious case of UKIP) to map party political allegiances onto Remain/Leave, or to conduct separate polls in each LA or small cluster of LAs (which, to the best of my knowledge, hasn't been done).
*Stirling dropped sharply on the Sunderland and Newcastle results. But IMO this is due to Stirling over-valuation over the past few days and especially during the course of polling day (owing to a lot of support for the pound on the basis of a very high probability of "Remain") and profit-taking by early traders in the Far East. No need for alarm just yet!!
